iostat -x is very useful to check disk i/o activities. Sometimes it is said that "check %util is less than 100%" or "check svctm is less than 50ms", but please do not fully trust these numbers. For example, the following two cases (DBT-2 load on MySQL) used same disks (two HDD disks, RAID1) and reached almost 100% util, but performance numbers were very different (no.2 was about twice as fast as n